The Internet is a wide area network that connects hundreds of thousands of computers and smaller sub-networks world-wide. Businesses, government bodies and entities, educational organizations, and individuals publish information or data organized in the form of websites. A website may comprise multiple web pages that display a specific set of information and may contain links to other web pages with related or additional information. Some web pages include multiple web pages that are displayed together in a single user interface window. Each web page is identified by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that includes the location or Web address of the computer that contains the resource to be accessed in addition to the location of the resource on that computer.
While web pages offer a host of information and services, not every service provider can offer web pages to which the public has unrestricted access. Online banking, subscription services, online medical records, online academic records, e-mail accounts, select government web sites, and confidential company web pages are just a few examples of areas where access by the general public to a network service generally is restricted. One way to facilitate restricted access is for service providers to require that individuals attempting to access a restricted website use a login identification (ID) procedure that generally includes a username and a password.
Additionally, some websites require membership including a paid subscription to access various services. Members are provided with identification information to allow access to the website and the subscription feature. A problem associated with this procedure is the fraudulent use of account information by the approved user. For example, a user may have a valid login ID and password to a subscription service for which the user pays a fee. The user may distribute their valid login information to others such that multiple users have access to the service while only one subscription fee has been paid. This fraudulent access to a network service is not remedied by anti-hacker methods of security.
Multiple login by unapproved users can cause many problems for service providers, other approved users of the service, and even for the approved user that distributes their account information. Service providers lose money if the fraudulently entered service is a subscription service for which only one fee is paid. If the website is, for example, a secure business website, the business may lose the confidentiality of valuable or extremely sensitive information. Additionally, congestion and/or overload of a provider's server may occur if more users than the server can handle are simultaneously accessing the service. For example, a provider may have 1,000 users with valid accounts who are permitted access to a network service. Knowing the number of valid users, the service provider may ensure that if 1,000 users are simultaneously accessing the service there will be no overload, slow service, or other server related problems. However, if due to fraudulent distribution of access information the number of users exceeds 1,000, provision of the service may become slow or even unavailable. Such disruption injures the providers reputation and interferes with the service access of valid users.
Access to the service by unapproved users may also have adverse effects for the user that fraudulently distributes the login information. Users may not be fully cognizant of the fact that other individuals possessing the user's login information may have access not only to the service, but to personal information. If the service is a subscription service payable by credit card, an individual with the user's login information may be able to view and to change the credit card information. Individuals with the user's account information may also be able to make account changes and incur additional fees to the user's account. Users may not realize these potential pitfalls when they provide others with their account information.
Prior systems have restricted access to the network service by identifying if a user is already accessing the service and disallowing a second access. Thus, prior systems do not allow multiple access to a network service from a single user account. However, a user may access a service, for example, from a work computer and later in the same day access the service from a home computer without logging out of the service before leaving work. Prior systems that control access to a network service do not allow the user multiple access to the service causing significant inconvenience to the user. Thus, there is a need for a system that discourages the fraudulent distribution of account access information for a network service while allowing a valid user access to a service from multiple locations.